1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a switching circuit and an operating method thereof, and more particularly, to a crossbar switching circuit capable of ensuring minimum latency and sustain bandwidth and a method for operating the same.
2. Description of Related Art
Fixed bus mode is commonly used in a general system such as SOC (system on chip) for connecting all functional modules inside a system chip (i.e. all of the source consumers and source providers) by using one or more system buses. If there are too many functional modules in a SOC chip, such system connecting method may cause a problem such as poor efficiency of accessing source providers (e.g. system memory), and it cannot provide a QOS (quality of service) function, which guarantees real time sustained bandwidth, to source consumers which require a guaranteed response time (e.g. guaranteed reading time).
Therefore, recently a connection method similar to the switching hub used in Local Area Network (LAN) had been applied on some SoC chips that provide more complicated functions to enhance the efficiency of accessing the source providers such as system memory. Such connection method such as the switching hub used in LAN environment is referred to as a crossbar switching configuration. However, the currently used crossbar switching configuration lacks the capability of providing the QOS (quality of service) function which guarantees real time sustained bandwidth.